As the comments are quick to point out – at the expense of the rest of the piece – the hardware isn’t the compelling story here. While you can buy your own, you can almost certainly hand build an equivalent-or-better set up for less money1, but Ars recognises this:

Of course, that’s exactly the point: the Orange Box is that taste of heroin that the dealer gives away for free to get you on board. And man, is it attractive. However, as Canonical told me about a dozen times, the company is not making them to sell—it’s making them to use as revenue driving opportunities and to quickly and effectively demo Canonical’s vision of the cloud.

Not only are they deploying Ubuntu and other open-source software to their students, they are encouraging those students to tinker with their laptops, and – better yet – some of those same students are directly involved in the development, distribution, and providing support for their peers. All of those students will take incredibly valuable experience with them into their future careers.

Today I was adding tox and Travis-CI support to a Django project, and I ran into a problem: our project doesn’t have a setup.py. Of course I could have added one, but since by convention we don’t package our Django projects (Django applications are a different story) – instead we use virtualenv and piprequirements files – I wanted to see if I could make tox work without changing our project.

Turns out it is quite easy: just add the following three directives to your tox.ini.

Although I still use my desktop replacement (i.e., little-to-no battery life) for a good chunk of my work, recent additions to my setup have resulted in some improvements that I thought others might be interested in.

For Christmas just gone my wonderful wife Suzanne – and my equally wonderful children, but let’s face it was her money not theirs! – bought me a HP Chromebook 14. Since the Chromebooks were first announced, I was dismissive of them, thinking that at best they would be a cheap laptop to install Ubuntu on. However over the last year my attitudes had changed, and I came to realise that at least 70% of my time is spent in some browser or other, and of the other 30% most is spent in a terminal or Sublime Text. This realisation, combined with the improvements Intel Haswell brought to battery life made me reconsider my position and start seriously looking at a Chromebook as a 2nd machine for the couch/coffee shop/travel.

I initially focussed on the HP Chromebook 11 and while the ARM architecture didn’t put me off, the 2GB RAM did. When I found the Chromebook 14 with a larger screen, 4GB RAM and Haswell chipset, I dropped enough subtle hints and Suzanne got the message.

So Christmas Day came and I finally got my hands on it! First impressions were very favourable: this neither looks nor feels like a £249 device. ChromeOS was exactly what I was expecting, and generally gets out of my way. The keyboard is superb, and I would compare it in quality to that of my late MacBook Pro. Battery life is equally superb, and I’m easily getting 8+ hours at a time.

Chrome – and ChromeOS – is not without limitations though, and although a new breed of in-browser environments such as Codebox, Koding, Nitrous.io, and Cloud9 are giving more options for developers, what I really want is a terminal. Enter Secure Shell from Google – SSH in your browser (with public key authentication). This lets me connect to any box of my choosing, and although I could have just connected back to my desk-bound laptop, I would still be limited to my barely-deserves-the-name-broadband ADSL connection.

So, with my Chromebook and SSH client in place, DigitalOcean was my next port of call, using their painless web interface to create an Ubuntu-based droplet. Command Line Interfaces are incredibly powerful, and despite claims to the contrary most developers spending most of their time with them1. There are a plethora of tools to improve your productivity, and my three must-haves are:

With this droplet I can do pretty much anything I need that ChromeOS doesn’t provide, and connect through to the many other droplets, linodes, EC2 nodes, OpenStack nodes and other servers I use personally and professionally.

In some other posts I’ll expand on how I use (and – equally importantly – how I secure) my DigitalOcean droplets, and which “apps” I use with Chrome.

The fact that I now spend most of my time in the browser and not on the command-line shows you that I’ve settled into my role as an engineering manager! ↩

This was quite timely as my team has been thinking about improving the process of creating our release notes, and it has been proposed that we generate them automatically from our commit messages. This in turn requires that we have commit messages of sufficient quality, which – to be honest – we don’t always. So the second proposal is to enforce “good” commit messages as part of reviewing and approving merge proposals into our projects. See this post from Kevin on my team for an overview of our branching strategies to get an idea of how our projects are structured.

We still need to define what constitutes a “good” message, but we will certainly use both the article from Thoughtbot and the oft-referenced advice from Tim Pope as our basis. We are also only planning to apply this to commits to trunk because, well, you don’t need a novel – or even a short story – for every commit in your spike branch!

Now, back to the Thoughtbot article, and this piece of advice stood out for me:

Never use the -m <msg> / --message=<msg> flag to git commit.

Since I first discovered -m I have used it almost exclusively, thinking I’m being so clever and efficient, but in reality I’ve been restricting what I could say to what felt “right” on an 80 character terminal. If nothing else, I will be trying to avoid the use of -m from now on.

As part of our self-improvement and knowledge sharing within Canonical, within our group (Professional and Engineering Services) we regularly – at least once a month – run what we call an “InfoSession”. Basically it is Google Hangout on Air with a single presenter on a topic that is of interest/relevance to others, and one of my responsibilities is organising them. Previously we have had sessions on: